The Intuitive Customer - Helping You Improve Your Customer Experience To Gain Growth

Many organizations are making a common mistake when it comes to AI. They fail to capitalize on the potential to enhance Customer Experiences through this powerful technology by building it incorrectly. By changing their strategic approach, they could gain a significant competitive advantage. Take, for instance, a telecom company that developed an AI system to detect customer churn. While it successfully identified customers likely to churn, it fell short in explaining why they were leaving. Here's the issue: AI models excel at predicting customer behavior but lack the ability to establish meaningful connections and provide context for the data. It's akin to Deep Thought from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy revealing that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42. It may be a correct answer, but we're left without understanding the underlying context. The mistake lies in how organizations set up their AI systems. The outcome resembles the ambiguous answer of 42. What we truly need is the context that explains the reasons behind it. In this episode, we explore the mistake many organizations are making with AI and what might happen if the Flat Earthers get a hold of it. Chances are their answer will be about as useful as 42. Here are some other key moments in the discussion: 01:42  Colin kicks it off by asking how to link together The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Flat Earthers, and Artificial Intelligence, and how that relates to the opportunity inherent in AI systems. 09:11  We describe the difference between machine learning and deep learning under the larger umbrella of AI work, and why machine learning might have biases written into its code. 14:44  Colin explains what Flat Earthers have to do with all this, and explains what they believe, suggesting that listeners watch this clip from the ABC News YouTube channel. 20:08  Colin share the big danger of all this, particularly when you consider the parts of Customer Science that are coming as a new wave of change. 29:16 We share our big takeaways from the discussion and how organizations would be wise to improve their AI strategy. _________________________________________________________________ Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here. Connect with Colin on LinkedIn HERE. Follow Colin on Twitter HERE. Click HERE to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.  To learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services Click here.

  _________________________________________________________________ Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here. Connect with Colin on LinkedIn HERE. Follow Colin on Twitter HERE. Click HERE to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.  To learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services Click here.

You wouldn’t think to look at it that The Magic Castle hotel in Los Angeles has been ranked in the top ten hotels on TripAdvisor, but it has. A converted apartment building has turned its unassuming appearance into an excellent experience for its guests, and how they do it isn’t that big of a thing, quite the opposite. It’s the little things make a big difference in their customer satisfaction.  In this case, it’s things like a popsicle hotline that makes this small hotel a surprisingly successful one. People who use the hotline—aka a red phone with a sign over it that reads, “Popsicle Hotline”—poolside receive a popsicle from the staff. Now, people remember this small thing when they talk about their experience. However, there are countless little things that happen in an experience that they don’t remember. These little things often create value to customers. However, since they don’t always remember them later when asked, they keep them a secret. In other words, they can’t tell you because they didn’t remember that moment specifically.  In this episode, we explore the little things in an experience that create value for customers and what you can do to leverage these types of moments in yours. Here are some other key moments in the discussion: 04:48   We both share many small things that can occur in an experience and how they create value.  09:34  We get into the idea of nudges and how they can affect our judgment of quality for an experience. 13:51  Colin shares an example of how small things can also change an experience and customer behavior at the same time, which just might save the world.  20:11  We talk about how you can apply this idea of convincing people to change in your experience with a little nudge and how to leverage that for experience improvement. 24:02  Colin explains how the Emotional Signature can help in your efforts to determine what are some of these “secret” things that matter to customers.  28:21 We share our practical advice for applying this concept of improving small things for people in your experience. _________________________________________________________________ Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here. Connect with Colin on LinkedIn HERE. Follow Colin on Twitter HERE. Click HERE to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.  To learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services Click here.

You probably don’t say no to people enough, especially if it’s to your boss. Like most of us, you are conditioned to cooperate with others, which means we usually say yes to most requests to avoid conflict. However, learning to say no in the right way, might also avoid conflict while simultaneously giving you back control over your life.  We host author Vanessa Patrick, Associate Dean for Research, Professor of Marketing, and researcher in the Consumer Behavior Marketing field, to talk about this right way to say no based on her book, "The Power of Saying No: The New Science of How to Say No to take Charge of Your Life." Patrick addresses this critical skill in her book, as well as its relationship to saying no to ourselves through self-regulation or self-control.   Patrick’s past research often depicts self-control as an upbeat version of self-discipline. Self-control serves as a reflection of your values, rather than self-imposed constraints. Patrick believes defining and defending these boundaries to others enables you to make decisions that create more fun and happiness in your life, particularly regarding the things you already said yes to.  In this episode, we explore the idea of personal policies, or the rules we set that should guide our decisions. Calling it compassionate self-control, Patrick says this approach facilitates having your needs driving your decisions. It also means that instead of looking out for cues from other about how to respond to these requests, we look within ourselves.   Here are some other key moments in the discussion: 01:29 Ryan introduces our guest and who then talks about her past research and explains how that led to the premise behind her new book. 06:16 Patrick explains the three competencies she identified that are essential to the “Art of Empowered Refusal.” 16:01. We discuss the significance of personal policies to guide your decisions and the two forms they can take to aid in that effort. 25:06  Patrick explains the importance of using empowering language, especially when talking to ourselves.  32:05  We discuss the practical applications of this concept in your life and how you can leverage Empowered Refusal in your life and work.  _________________________________________________________________ Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here. Connect with Colin on LinkedIn HERE. Follow Colin on Twitter HERE. Click HERE to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.  To learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services Click here.

Your customers are having a relationship with your brand right under your nose. Do you know if it’s a strong, healthy one? Our connection with brands is much like any other relationship in our lives, with some being healthy while others are not. Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for people to form codependent or dysfunctional relationships with brands. Therefore, it's essential to build strong brand relationships with your customers. Despite being legalistic trademarks, brands have become an entity, almost human-like, with which people form a personal connection. The corporate structure with its trademarks, colors, taglines, and messaging guidelines are irrelevant to customers.  What matters is the brand's presence in customers' minds, memories, thoughts, and emotions. Creating an attachment is crucial.  Stephen Covey, the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, introduced the concept of the Emotional Bank Account years ago, which can apply to these relationships customers have with your brand. Emotional Bank Accounts have positive and negative deposits in them all the time, only the assets held within are how we feel about the brand.  Just like we have these accounts with people in our lives, brands also make deposits and withdrawals in these accounts. In this episode, we explore the ideas behind these five rules and how they help you form a strong emotional bond with your customers with a robust deposit history in their emotional bank accounts, ensuring their loyalty to your brand. Here are a few key moments in the discussion: 01:29  The podcast begins with the idea of brands and what they are. 08:04  We kick off the five rules, with the first one, “Focus on emotional benefits and value to your customers, not just on product features.” 19:13  We talk about the importance of storytelling and why it matters in branding. 20:25  Ryan explains that trust is foundational to the relationship but not the place to stop and why.  23:48  We share the final rule and explain why people need practical ways to make emotional connections, not wispy, ethereal concepts that don’t mean anything in the real world.  _________________________________________________________________ Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here. Connect with Colin on LinkedIn HERE. Follow Colin on Twitter HERE. Click HERE to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.  To learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services Click here.

Getting your new program initiatives accepted requires overcoming a lot. So, to help you get that done—and impress your boss doing it—you need to have a winning strategy.  The corporate budget is a funny thing. Getting approval on a budget in the corporate world doesn’t mean you get to spend it. Quite the contrary. You often have to get the budget approved for what you might spend and then when you want to spend it, you get approval again.  When you read it written out like that, it sounds super inefficient and completely silly. However, my guess is that many of you that are responsible for a budget know exactly what we mean.   Plus, change is hard for people. As a champion of a business program that would result in significant change, you are already going to have a challenging time getting that approved. This episode helps you get through this inefficient and silly process successfully, and impressing your boss while you do it.  We share our tips and tricks for handling this process with clarity, influence, political awareness, realism, credibility, and professionalism.  Here are some other key moments in the discussion: 1:32 Colin shares a personal story about getting permission to spend his corporate budget, what he did to get it, and how it led to this podcast. 05:43  We share the first one about being clear about the goal and how numbers are essential to these discussions.  13:44 Now we explore how the good clear ideas you have that are supported by numbers need this critical spin so people can hear what you mean, followed by a foray into managing company politics. 21:52  We get into credibility, which is essential to convincing people to follow your way of thinking. 26:40  To round out the discussion, we get to the most important one, the one you have the most control over, professionalism.  _________________________________________________________________ Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here. Connect with Colin on LinkedIn HERE. Follow Colin on Twitter HERE. Click HERE to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.  To learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services Click here.

Organizations often fail to consider the context in which customers enter the experience, assuming that every customer is the same. However, recognizing the context of a customer's experience is crucial to developing an effective customer strategy. Context is an omnipresent factor in customer experience. Depending on a customer's context, we must create a customized experience.  For instance, while working on a project for one of the cellular phone companies in the United States, we discovered that they treated customers who had lost their phone or had it stolen in the same manner. This oversight neglected the importance of context. Consider how you would feel if you had lost your phone in the back of a taxi. Most likely, you would feel foolish, right? Now, consider how you would feel if your phone was stolen. You might feel outraged, or scared, or both, which are different emotional responses than how you might feel after leaving your phone in a cab. Despite this, the mobile company treated both types of customers in the same way. They immediately requested the account number from both. However, we convinced them to determine what happened first, followed by ensuring the customer's safety if their phone was stolen. This simple change had an enormous impact on their experience design and outcomes. Thus, segmentation is a vital aspect of anticipating context. People bring unique perspectives and expectations to their experience. While segmentation is only one factor that can determine context, it is an excellent starting point. In this episode, we explore why context is crucial to customer experience design and how you can improve your understanding of your customer’s context. Here are some other key moments in the discussion: 03:10.  We discuss how Kenneth Cukier’s TED talk about “Big Data is Better Data” and how having data isn’t enough to predict how people will interpret it.  07:12 Colin tests his theories with Ryan, who has his own context, which is always a fun activity. 10:20 Ryan shares an interesting demonstration of different contexts clashing in a researchers work with an isolated tribe in the Pacific. 14:20  Colin shares his recent insight about diversity, which he describes as a “blinding flash of the bloody obvious.” 18:09  We get into a discussion about changing a person’s context gracefully and the skills needed here.  27:48 We share our advice for helping organizations improve their experience understanding and using context in experience design. _________________________________________________________________ Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here. Connect with Colin on LinkedIn HERE. Follow Colin on Twitter HERE. Click HERE to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.  To learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services Click here.

Journey Maps can be useless exercises. That’s right…we said it. However, these often-used tools don’t have to be as useless as they usually are. Journey Maps are only useless if you don’t include the customer’s emotional journey in them.  Emotional journeys are the “squishy stuff” associated with why customers buy from you. Since customer’s feelings are challenging to itemize, many organizations tend to leave them off. However, the result is a customer process, not a journey map.  After all, without this information, how can you expect to predict and anticipate customer behavior? Moreover, how can you design an experience that is so well positioned for customers’ needs that they come back for more (and more)? In this episode— and at the behest of a very complimentary listener who says we actually taught them something (!!)—we explore how you can integrate customer behavior, and the emotions that drive that behavior, into your journey maps. We show you how all the things we talk about on this podcast apply in a practical way and can produce practical results, like an ROI.  Here are some other key moments in the discussion: 04:10  We explain how we will demonstrate the application of behavioral sciences concepts to a standard Journey Map that we made up about booking a hotel online. 12:15  We go through each of the ten concepts we agreed upon before the show, and then Colin adds a bonus one at the end, catching Ryan off guard.  21:29  Using the checklist of (now) 11 concepts, we begin taking you through the process of applying each one to the booking a hotel online journey map, starting with Customer Segmentation, and so on through the list.  27:05  Ryan points out that many times, changes in how organizations serve customers can have an inadvertent effect on how an experience ends, which is detrimental to the emotional journey.  32:58  Colin shares a personal story of how a rental car company bamboozled him into getting a car he couldn’t afford after a long-haul flight across the pond, and it cost the company money as a result.  37:00  We share our final tips and key takeaways from this exercise and how it should help you have a more complete picture of the customer journey.  _________________________________________________________________ Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here. Connect with Colin on LinkedIn HERE. Follow Colin on Twitter HERE. Click HERE to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.  To learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services Click here.

Having a high IQ isn’t the most important thing for leadership. It helps, but intelligence isn’t enough to make a great leader.  It turns out that IQ without EQ, or emotional intelligence, doesn’t inspire teams to meet or exceed their goals. This EQ concept, popularized by Daniel Goleman, has been a crucial component of the leadership conversation for several years. Similarly, customer service representatives with high EQ are crucial for the emotional management of customers. The ability to understand and manage emotions is a crucial factor in ensuring customer satisfaction. EQ involves the ability to identify and manage our own emotions and the emotions of others, as well as understanding your reactions to situations and how they may affect others. In other words, leaders and customer service representatives who can remain calm and objective in stressful situations are more effective in their roles. In this episode, we will delve into the concept of EQ, what it entails, and its impact on leadership and customer service strategies. We will explore the five realms of EQ, starting with knowing your emotions. Here are some other key moments in the discussion: 03:26  We introduce EQ and Goleman’s concept of the five realms of it, and how the first concept of it helped in Colin’s recent weight loss efforts.  08:50  Colin shares a story about how 30 years ago as a middle manager he went to a 360-degree feedback event that fundamentally changed how he thought about himself.  12:51 Ryan talks about how he likes that unlike intelligence, EQ is something you can work on and improve, no matter what you were given naturally.  17:11 Colin talks about the most silent transaction he ever had at the grocery store, and why that employee might be in the wrong position in the store.  20:30  We explain how well you deal with change is an essential part of EQ, particularly if you have some work to do. 28:55  We summarize what we learned and how developing EQ can help one’s leadership as well as improve the Customer Experience their organization delivers.  _________________________________________________________________ Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here. Connect with Colin on LinkedIn HERE. Follow Colin on Twitter HERE. Click HERE to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.  To learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services Click here.

Vijay, one of our listeners, drew my attention to a deficit in my content regarding customer strategy. He asked if we had anything on customer engagement. After a search of both my hard drives (computer and memory), I realized that I didn’t. To remedy this giant hole in our content, we recorded this podcast.  Now, part of not having any content on the subject means I didn’t have a definition ready for the term. However, like anyone would these days, I fixed that with an internet search. I found an excellent one at HubSpot, another great one at Salesforce, and third at Qualtrics. Each of these definitions was unique and oddly familiar. However, together they do a great job of defining the general outline of the concept. To summarize them, let’s say that customer engagement is about interacting with customers in a connected way through a variety of channels to build an emotional connection with them.  In a recent podcast with Customer Experience pioneer Joe Pine, we explored the idea of time well spent. One addition I might make to the combination definition from my previous three sources is to deliver an experience that a customer thinks of as “time well-spent.” Often when customers feel this way about your product, service, or experience, they will recommend it to their friends and family—which is an excellent indication of engagement.  In this episode, we explore the concept of customer engagement and how you can craft a winning strategy for it in your experiences. Plus, we fill a hole in our content to satisfy Vijay’s request and feel better about the job we are doing engaging you with our content.  Here are some other key moments in the discussion: 03:53  We share definitions regarding Customer Engagement and how we agree and disagree with part of them. 10:44  We discuss how finding a new idea in marketing is essential, so, reengaging old concepts under a new name is fine if it means solid strategy comes back into fashion.  17:02  We revisit the idea first shared by Pine on an earlier podcast about how engagement is also about time, from giving it to you to thinking of what was spent with you as a good investment.  20:52  Ryan offers his critique about the concept of customer engagement and a common mistake many organizations make when trying to improve it.  22:43  Colin share his key takeaways about the concept and how you can apply a practical strategy for engagement moving forward.  _________________________________________________________________ Did you know we have a YouTube Channel too? Check it out here. Connect with Colin on LinkedIn HERE. Follow Colin on Twitter HERE. Click HERE to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.  To learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services Click here.